The Young Lady's Mentor eBook

The other curse of the happy, has a range more wide
and indiscriminate. It, too, tortures only the
comparatively rich and fortunate; but is most active
among the least distinguished; and abates in malignity
as we ascend to the lofty regions of pure ennui.
This is the desire of being fashionable;—­the
restless and insatiable passion to pass for creatures
a little more distinguished than we really are—­with
the mortification of frequent failure, and the humiliating
consciousness of being perpetually exposed to it.
Among those who are secure of “meat, clothes,
and fire,” and are thus above the chief physical
evils of existence, we do believe that this is a more
prolific source of unhappiness, than guilt, disease,
or wounded affection; and that more positive misery
is created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the
eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful ambition,
than by all the ravages of passion, the desolations
of war, or the accidents or mortality. This may
appear a strong statement; but we make it deliberately;
and are deeply convinced of its truth. The wretchedness
which it produces may not be so intense; but it is
of much longer duration, and spreads over a far wider
circle. It is quite dreadful, indeed, to think
what a sweep of this pest has taken among the comforts
or our prosperous population. To be though fashionable—­that
is, to be thought more opulent and tasteful, and on
a footing of intimacy with a greater number of distinguished
persons than they really are, is the great and laborious
pursuit of four families out of five, the members
of which are exempted from the necessity of daily
industry. In this pursuit, their time, spirits,
and talents are wasted; their tempers soured; their
affections palsied; and their natural manners and
dispositions altogether sophisticated and lost.

These are the great twin scourges of the prosperous:
But there are other maladies, of no slight malignity,
to which they are peculiarly liable. One of these,
arising mainly from want of more worthy occupation,
is that perpetual use of stratagem and contrivance—­that
little, artful diplomacy of private life, by which
the simplest and most natural transactions are rendered
complicated and difficult, and the common business
of existence made to depend on the success of plots
and counterplots. By the incessant practice of
this petty policy, a habit of duplicity and anxiety
is infallibly generated, which is equally fatal to
integrity and enjoyment. We gradually come to
look on others with the distrust which we are conscious
of deserving; and are insensibly formed to sentiments
of the most unamiable selfishness and suspicion.
It is needless to say, that all these elaborate artifices
are worse than useless to the person who employs them;
and that the ingenious plotter is almost always baffled
and exposed by the downright honesty of some undesigning
competitor. Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of “Manoeuvring,”
has given a very complete and most entertaining representation